Jurisprudence in our civil courts is not merely law and precedent in judicial interpretation of law. As a nation with a constitution, jurisprudence in non-criminal matters might be thought to come to this: is a law or regulation taken to implement a law, consistent with a provision or provisions of a constitution. The historical facts as to how a constitution came to be in place over peoples within a given polity has become a fundamental or, if you prefer, an ultimate consideration.
Consider matters of law in 1919 in Paris at the peace conference arising from the 1918 armistice. No legal presupposition appeared to entail, at that time, that the Japanese people were men in the sense that Europeans were men in matters of international law. It was not merely that some peoples lived in polities too little advanced to escape tutelage under the Europeans: it was that the peoples themselves were not men in ultimate matters of law.
Suppose for a moment that the characterization of the last paragraph does reflect the state of considerations of international law in the Paris of 1919. On this view, the national aspirations of the Japanese were stymied, historically a nontrivial matter if that frustration contributed in causing or justifying the Pacific theatre of WW2. In seeking to redress that injustice and the wrongs to which it gave rise, would it matter that the Japanese themselves were inconsistent in their evaluation of Africans as men, Korean laborers in Japan as men, the inhabitants of Okinawa as a people withe a king, or the Ainu people of Hokaido and the Kirile Islands as men?
Consider the case of Canada and the aboriginal and Métis peoples not treated as peoples in laws evaluated in relation to the new Canadian Constitution prior to 2018.
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